If that is what the author meant, that is what the author should have said. "Equipped to deliver" pretty clearly means no aircraft that can load the bomb.
At any rate, southern Russia is easily within range of Incirlik.
The Toyota Hilux isn't an aircraft. The B61 is an air-dropped dumb bomb. Any aircraft that can load it and drop it in the air can deliver it. If you didn't care about accuracy you could roll the thing out the back of a C-130 and successfully deliver it.
The point is, there is no equipment required to deliver the B61 other than a standard weapons rack with any air-to-ground aircraft has. The only A/G aircraft I am aware of that can't deliver the B61 is the F-22A, and only because the bomb won't fit in the weapons bay.
The B61 is designed to be delivered from any aircraft that can carry Mark 80-series iron bombs. Combined with the two-man rule (which means at least partial arming on the ground for a weapon launched from a single-seat aircraft), this means most of the setup needs to be done on the ground. It may be that the weapon is completely armed at that point, save for a failsafe tied to the rack that keeps the bomb from going off when still attached to the aircraft.
i think whether or not a plane can actually get to the target is pretty fair use of 'equipped to deliver'.
new york times is not writing for a military audience, 'deliver' in lay person speak means getting it there, as in parcel delivery.
i.e. if your truck can only hold 1 gallon of fuel it's not equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away. whether you can put the package on the truck does not imply any fitness for delivery.
> i think whether or not a plane can actually get to the target is pretty fair use of 'equipped to deliver'.
So "the target" is always and forever Russia, and mainland Russia at that? No, the generic statement "equipped to deliver" cannot be interpreted with respect to a particular use case among many. It means "capable of loading the weapon and striking a target".
> new york times is not writing for a military audience, 'deliver' in lay person speak means getting it there, as in parcel delivery.
Any aircraft capable of carrying air-to-ground ordinance can "get it there", for some set of "it"s.
> i.e. if your truck can only hold 1 gallon of fuel it's not equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away.
By your definition no truck is "equipped to deliver the package to a destination 1000 miles away", yet trucks do this every day. You are adding a bunch of hidden assumptions about what "equipped" means, many of which aren't valid.
If Turkey shot Armenia with a nuclear bomb, given the location and size of Armenia, that'd also affect Azerbaijan, Turkey herself, and, Iran. That means if we shot Armenia with an American nuclear missile, we'd be left in the middle of an interracial nuclear orgy where the US, the Russia (ally of Armenia) and the Iran wipe us out of the world map (quite geographically).
The dirt secret about nuclear war is that Russia and the USA were much more willing to engage in a limited war where each side nuked the hell out of the allies of the other but without directly attacking each other.
There is no way Russia launches a nuclear strike on America on the behalf of Armenia. It would be suicide.
I have no direct knowledge, but I thought there was special command consent hardware required to arm the bomb. I'd be surprised if nuclear consent capability was standard on every plane.
Edit: After some googling I'm surprised to find that they do indeed all seem to have consent controls standard. Not sure what I think about that.
I read an Air Force safety standards memo[1] which seemed to confirm that the PAL codes are entered on the ground.
To speculate the B61 is a dumb bomb. And most photo's of the casing show no plug/contact point for electronics. I'm assuming at take off. When the neutron reflector's distance is set, and the barometric pressure for denotation height is calibrated.
Yeah, my guess is the bomb is armed and the yield and other parameters set just before the aircraft is set to taxi out for takeoff. Some part of it must be done on the ground, because no US nuclear weapon can be armed by a single person.
It wouldn't have to have a port. The US has had radio programmed artillery shells for a long time so using the same tech to set and arm bombs isn't a stretch.
These are just proximity fuses. I can find no reference to actual communication with in-flight artillery shells. Furthermore Nuclear Artillery shells were armed when loaded. They were one of the few systems outside of the two-man rule. As a single inferior officer would arm the shell when loading it.
I wonder if arming of a bomb like that has a time limit - so that it safes itself if not "used" or explicitly deactivated within a particular time period.
>To arm the weapons you just open a panel held by two captive screws - like a battery cover on a radio - using a thumbnail or a coin.
>Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which you can turn with an Allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or groundburst and other parameters.
>The Bomb is actually armed by inserting a bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees. There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the Bomb.
The New Yorker is pretty obsessive about fact-checking, so I think calling a statement like this a lie is an uncharitable reading.